Death, madness and biscuits… or how to prepare amazing presentations

Sales Innovation Expo is coming. It means that some of you will face the task of preparing another presentation.

You may find yourself sitting in front of your laptop, trying to push pixels in the right direction. The outcome is very frequently not as beautiful and convincing as you would like it to be. Death, madness, and more biscuits… and even more coffee – this is where you usually end up – in the Whatever Zone…

Later on, after countless hours of preparations, during this important expose, you feel like you had something like this behind your back:

Those of you who know a thing or two about letters will notice that We’ve listed here the closest free alternatives to crème de la crème of the world of typography.

2. Colours

Pick 2 or 3 colours and use them all the time. If you’re going to have 3 colours in your presentation, use 60/30/10 rule. It’s like composing the perfect outfit for a gentleman. 60% will be the colour of the suit, 30% – a shirt and 10% can be a punch of colour on a tie… or a delicate accent. For the presentation pick the colour of the background (60%), the colour of the font (30%) and the rest for the accent. Remember that the contrast is a key to readability. The bigger contrast – the better!

3. Less truly is more.

Not everything can be BOLD, BIG FAT AND FURIOUS at the same time. If everything is equally important – nothing is. Give your audience a chance to notice a title first, then a subtitle, then a line or two of additional, smaller text.

To sum it up:

use only a couple lines of text per slide

don’t use more than 15 slides – unless it’s a whole day training

if you want to show EVERYTHING – your audience will remember NOTHING

4. Give them a job!

Think of your slides as players in your team. Every one of them should have a job; a task that will bring something new to the table and make your presentation better. Don’t add additional fluff only for the sake of having additional fluff… Keep animations and accents for the most important moments. If you don’t know exactly what is the task of a particular slide – delete it.

5. Visualise yourself

Have you heard that the brain can digest images 60 000 times faster than text? Visualise yourself properly!

Rules of thumb:

Clipart was cool in the nineties. Don’t use clipart. It is as funny as your weird uncle Earl who likes to embarrass the whole family with inappropriate jokes during the Christmas dinner.

Choose unusual but informative photos. Seriously, we’ve all seen this smiled stock lady so many times…

Remember to embed fonts to your presentation. If you fail to do it you may end up with an unexpected Comic Sans instead of your carefully chosen typeface. (In PowerPoint click File → Options → Save → Embed fonts in the file).